Coming to Terms with an Author
Coming to terms with an author means identifying the key words in a book and determining what the author means by them in that specific work. For Adler, terms are the basic units of communicable knowledge.
The crucial distinction is between words and terms. A word can have many meanings. A term is a word used with a definite meaning inside a particular argument. If reader and author attach different meanings to the same crucial word, then apparent communication is happening while real communication is failing.
This makes the concept more than vocabulary work. It is a guard against equivocation, projection, and pseudo-understanding. The reader has to locate the key terms, see where they are loaded, and translate them accurately before moving on to judgment.
It connects strongly to specialized terminology and context clues, but it is narrower and more serious. The issue is not merely decoding a difficult word. It is joining the author's conceptual system accurately enough that the rest of the argument can be read without distortion.